The count of connected mobile devices in use, including mobile phones and tablets, has recently exceeded the population of our planet. According to market forecasts, by 2016 there will be over ten billion of Internet-connected mobile devices in use, of which around eight billion will be smartphones and tablets. With the proliferation of mobile lifestyles, productivity and convenience of billions of people will increasingly depend on the efficiency of their operation of mobile devices and applications.
Haptic control has become an important efficiency aspect for modern applications running on smartphones and tablets. Touchscreen navigation and operations are a mainstream method of application control in mobile productivity software. Several basic gestures, such as tap, drag, scroll, pinch/zoom, and swipe, are assigned similar functionality across a broad variety of platforms, form factors, devices, and applications, and have long become ubiquitous on tablet and smartphone multi-touch screens.
Usability requirements of touch controlled mobile devices may present software designers with challenging choices between size of touch-aware elements of User Interface (UI), on the one hand, and productive use of screen real estate, on the other hand. Sufficient sizes of touch operated UI elements, such as buttons, navigation panes, tabs, etc. are useful for easy operation, especially by people with larger fingertips. At the same time, productive utilization of a screen space dictates minimizing a navigation related portion of the UI and offering maximum area for a productive content—text, images, tables, graphs, etc. An intrinsic conflict of navigation convenience with the handiness of viewing and editing content invites for constant innovation in touch-enabled UI designs.
One widespread type of mobile software applications which is also common for desktop and web applications is a date-and-time picker, which facilitates date & time entry into calendars, forms and dedicated application fields. Date-and-time pickers are designed to replace error-prone manual typing of date/time values and to offer keyboard-free selection based on a graphical UI.
Two types of date-and-time pickers are calendar style date pickers and a wheel scroller style date pickers. Calendar style pickers, such as used, for example, in the Microsoft Outlook software or the Microsoft Silverlight software, display a monthly calendar grid for a date selection; such grid view may be supplemented with a round clock face for direct time setting or for displaying a time value entered into a field below the clock. In the calendar style picker, months are often switched by horizontal scrolling arrows, which may be located in the upper corners of a grid; a time field may allow selection, manual typing or scrolling via similar small scrolling arrows. Calendar style pickers may be difficult to operate with multi-touch gestures because of small navigational elements (arrows) for switching month and time values and because of the necessity to periodically select small text entities within time field; they are better suited for the precise clicking associated with the use of mouse.
Wheel scroller style pickers used in mobile applications for Apple iOS, Google Android and other operating systems may have a separate, independently operated touch enabled scrollbar for each date-and-time component: day, month, year, hour, minute, and an additional scrollbar or button for the am/pm choice. Such date & time pickers may be operated similarly to multiple-dial locks where each component of the date/time format is independently scrolled to reach a desired position. Well suited for one-finger operation on mobile touch screens, wheel scroller style pickers nevertheless lack visual consistency and convenience of the calendar view, and in many cases do not include days of the week and may occupy a significant portion of the screen, which could challenge efficient combination of wheel scroller style pickers with the application data.
Accordingly, it is desirable to develop compact date-and-time pickers with easy and fast multi-touch operation that can be seamlessly embedded into mobile productivity applications.